Latest news with #IverHuitfeldt
Telegraph
08-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The Danes have given up on their best warships: Lessons for the Royal Navy
Building warships is hard. To those who have been in one this will come as no surprise but for the majority who have not, and who see them like one's phone or car, then this is not well understood. A warship is a complicated assembly of many different complicated things, most of which need to be networked and connected to each other. Any given class of warship tends to be made in small numbers, too, and there may be major differences even between warships of the same class. The first Arleigh Burke class destroyers in the US Navy, for instance, were 8,400 tons: the latest are 9,700. To some extent, every warship is custom built. And they're so expensive that there isn't usually much scope for prototypes and extensive tests on them before building the actual ship. The Danes, however, do know all this, having lately found out just how difficult it is to get right. The Danish Chief of Defence recently announced that ongoing attempts to repair and upgrade the Royal Danish Navy's Iver Huitfeldt-class frigates will be abandoned. This is painful for the Danes as these three ships are the most modern in the Danish navy: and, on paper at least, they are the most capable. The reality, dramatically exposed in the Red Sea last year, is rather different. In the case of the Iver Huitfeldt herself, an integration failure between different weapons and sensors caused the ship's crew to lose the use of their air defence missiles for up to half an hour during a Houthi attack. They rebooted the command system and subsequently fired more missiles but in the hottest missile environment of recent times, this could have ended very differently. Their fallback option for shooting down drones – twin 76mm cannons – had similar command and control issues with 'up to half' the shells detonating too close to the ship to be effective. The then Chief of Defence was relieved of his position and the ship removed from theatre: red faces all round (which was better than the alternative). The problem was that a ship's detection and fire control radars, other sensors, command system, weapons and power delivery train all need to work as one and all at once. The search radar must find the incoming threat, it must then pass the information to the fire-control radar, the fire-control radar needs to get a lock on the threat, the missile system then needs that information – usually a human gets briefly involved here. Then a missile must launch and acquire the threat itself at some point, either using the reflections from the fire-control radar or its own active radar, or both at different times: or it may be guided initially by networked commands, possibly using information provided from a completely different ship, or an aircraft. Meanwhile the ship's installed generation must be powering and cooling all this kit reliably and in many modern cases driving the propulsion too. Good ships – the US Navy's Arleigh Burke destroyers and the Royal Navy's Type 23 frigates, for example – do all this well. Bad ships – the US Littoral Combat Ships and our early Type 45 destroyers before they were partly fixed – do not. One of the issues is that all the various systems may not originally have been built to work together. The Arleigh Burkes use Mark 41 missile launch tubes, originally built to work with the Burkes' Aegis combat system and its accompanying, hugely powerful radars: that configuration is proven and reliable. The Iver Huitfelts use Mark 41 tubes too, but connected to different, European made radars and command systems. In this case of the Red Sea failure, many fingers point at the Thales phased array radar's ability to talk to the command system, but the detail isn't as important as noting the complexity. The problem is obviously a deep-seated one, as it has evidently proved uneconomic to fix. One lesson that is crystal clear is that no feasible amount of laboratory work, peacetime testing and training can replicate the stresses and strains of combat. Whilst the gun issue was known about before, the missile fire control system problem was not, and only became exposed when real weapons were in the air. Our Type 45 destroyer operating in the Red Sea, HMS Diamond, had the opposite issue when it shot down a ballistic missile previously thought to be outside its capabilities. This is a nice surprise, but it was a surprise, and it shows again that you don't know until you do it for real. Looking back in time, we had terrible problems in the Falklands and in the Gulf with our old Sea Dart and Sea Wolf missiles. (The sole Sea Dart engagement of 1991, in which an antique Silkworm missile was shot down, was claimed as a success. It should be noted that the Silkworm had already – luckily – missed HMS Gloucester and carried on past before the destroyer managed to shoot it down.) The difficulty of weapons systems integration is also why I get a little nervous when plug-in or containerised systems are cited as a more flexible way of fighting ships in the future. On paper they can appear to be but if they don't integrate into the command system properly then you quickly end up with the Iver H problem. And by the time you've spent enough money to get around this, then maybe you should have just made that system part of the ship in the first place.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Denmark to invest around $615 million to renew Navy, Home Guard fleets
PARIS — Denmark will invest about 4 billion Danish kroner (US$615 million) through 2033 in the country's Navy and Home Guard fleets, aiming to improve surveillance and defense of the country's home waters, the government said. The plans include the acquisition of four multifunctional environmental-protection and minelaying vessels, a ship with drones and sonar systems to monitor underwater activity, as well as 21 new vessels for the Naval Home Guard, Defense Minister Troels Lund Poelsen said at a press conference in Copenhagen on Tuesday. The plan was backed by the three-party coalition government and six of the eight other parties in parliament. The parties also agreed on long-term investments in additional capabilities, including air-defense frigates, as well as a decision later this year to buy more Arctic vessels, with details still to be determined. The tasks of the four environmental and minelaying vessels will include surveillance as well as clean-up of chemical and oil spills. Denmark will additionally boost the Navy's ability to monitor both above and under water with a program to develop autonomous units such as underwater drones, according to Lund Poelsen. The government had sketched the outlines of its long-term fleet plan in March, with Lund Poelsen saying the Danish frigate fleet still had a decade in it, with the new naval plan preparing the future acquisition of the next generation of vessels. While the Navy's current frigates still have 'good years' left, new investments have to be made, and due diligence calls for agreement on a new fleet plan before the decision to buy new frigates, Lund Poelsen said. He said those decisions will be made when NATO's capability goals are finalized in June. Lund Poelsen said 'it's no secret' that the next round of naval investment will involve 'a very large number of billions,' without providing details. The Danish government in February agreed to allocate an additional 50 billion kroner to defense over the coming two years, boosting defense spending to more than 3% of GDP in 2025 and 2026. There is a political ambition for the future frigates and the Arctic vessels to be built in Denmark, though there is no decision on that yet, according to the defense minister. Lund Poelsen said he believes Denmark can do more to cooperate with other NATO countries with regards to participating in their frigate capacity-expansion programs. Denmark currently operates three frigates in the Iver Huitfeldt class, the first of which entered service in 2012. The 139-meter vessels, designed for air defense, displace 6,645 tons and are equipped with a 32-cell Mk 41 vertical missile launcher. The Danish Navy also operates two Absalon-class anti-submarine warfare frigates with a multi-purpose deck, which entered service in 2005. The Danish Navy has been using a modular payload system called Standard Flex since the 1990s, allowing vessels to swap out containerized weapons or systems for different missions or roles. The lead vessel in the Iver Huitfeldt class infamously experienced a malfunction of critical weapon and sensor systems on deployment in the Red Sea in 2024, resulting in Lund Poelsen firing Denmark's chief of defense for reportedly failing to disclose the issues aboard the frigate. The Niels Juel, a sister ship of the Iver Huitfeldt, suffered a separate incident while docked in April last year, with the crew unable to deactivate the booster of a Harpoon missile during testing.
